Pupil data sharing with the Police and Home Office

The request was successful.

Dear Department for Education,

Under the Freedom of Information Act please advise if the Police or Home Office have requested data, or whether data has been sent to them, from the National Pupil Database and or any other Department of Education held pupil level database.

a) Please break down by number of requests received from each body and
b) Whether the requests have been granted or refused

Some parts of this request may be easier to answer than others and in such case please could you release available data as soon as possible rather than delay the entire request.
If you are not fully certain of what it is I am asking then I look forward to contact from you as soon as possible to clarify what it is I am requesting in order to meet your obligations under the law. If the costs of processing this request exceed the limit in the Act, please advise on what information you are able to supply within the cost limit.

Yours faithfully,

Pippa King

Department for Education

Dear Mr King

Thank you for your recent enquiry. A reply will be sent to you as soon as possible. For information; the departmental standard for correspondence received is that responses should be sent within 20 working days as you are requesting information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Your correspondence has been allocated reference number 2016-0032573.

Thank you

Department for Education
Ministerial and Public Communications Division
Tel: 0370 000 2288

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Department for Education

Dear Ms King,

Ref: 2016-0032573

Thank you for your request for information, which was received on 04/07/2016. The request has been dealt with under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (“the Act”).

You asked the following:

Under the Freedom of Information Act please advise if the Police or Home Office have requested data, or whether data has been sent to them, from the National Pupil Database and or any other Department of Education held pupil level database.

a) Please break down by number of requests received from each body and

b) Whether the requests have been granted or refused

Since April 2012, the Police have submitted 31 requests for information to the National Pupil Database. All were granted, however only 21 resulted in information being supplied.

Such disclosures are considered under section 29(3) of the Data Protection Act, at the discretion of the Department for Education where the public interest argument in favour of disclosure has been shown and where it is shown that failure to disclosure the information would significantly prejudice the police investigation. All requests from the police must be in writing and requests are handled on a case by case basis. The decision as to whether to disclose requested information is taken at an appropriately senior level in our organisation and the reasons for the decision are documented.

Since April 2012, the Home Office has submitted 20 requests for information to the National Pupil Database. Of these 18 were granted and 2 were refused as the NPD did not contain the information requested.

The information supplied to you continues to be protected by copyright. You are free to use it for your own purposes, including for private study and non-commercial research, and for any other purpose authorised by an exception in current copyright law. Documents (except photographs) can be also used in the UK without requiring permission for the purposes of news reporting. Any other re-use, for example commercial publication, would require the permission of the copyright holder.

Most documents produced by a government department or agency will be protected by Crown Copyright. Most Crown copyright information can be re-used under the Open Government Licence (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/o...). For information about the OGL and about re-using Crown Copyright information please see The National Archives website -http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/infor... .

Copyright in other documents may rest with a third party. For information about obtaining permission from a third party see the Intellectual Property Office’s website at www.ipo.gov.uk<http://www.ipo.gov.uk/>.

If you wish to complain about the handling of this FOI request, you should make a complaint to the Department by writing to me within two calendar months of the date of this letter. Your complaint will be considered by an independent review panel, who were not involved in the original consideration of your request.

If you are not content with the outcome of your complaint to the Department, you may then contact the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Yours sincerely,

Martin Johnson

Department for Education